What's in a Name?

The Past is a Foreign Land.

This is a phrase with deep meaning and the title of various books and movies that have appeared in various languages. Anyone who has tried to explain something to another that they recall from their youth, especially to a much younger person, will likely understand the basic import of how "foreign" the past can seem to anyone who did not directly experience it. This can be a problem of perception or of reality - and sometimes both. 

In my last post I talked about how things appear different today when I am focusing attention on The World's Most Talked About Role-Playing Game. In this post I wish to add a few additional thoughts on this subject partly to help clarify my own contradictory beliefs.

The FRP game I started with, specifically the 1974 Little Brown Books in their 5th printing, is/was probably not as I now recall it. After decades of experience with later editions of what is often referred to as The World's First Role-Playing Game, as well as several other "spin-off" RPGs (variations on a theme, I propose) some of which show genuine innovative design in mechanics and play style, my opinions on the old favorite are undoubtedly influenced by all that has transpired to date. Simply put, I am not the same person I was in 1977. 

It can be said that we are the sum total of all our experiences. If this is true, and I suspect that it is, I like most everyone else, will have a unique perspective, one that differs from everyone else and is wholly my own. Given that we all have a degree of common experiences as humans, but also that each individual will have many unique experiences, the combination is unlikely to repeat in any two people. Perhaps its a wonder we agree on anything?

Fortunately we are able to set aside our differences and consent to cooperate in an effort to "all get along". Sometimes this "compromising" is necessary among a gaming group. It is said that compromise means that precisely no one is happy with the outcome and in a hobby based around a shared effort to have fun, this seems an unfortunate situation.

Now in our culture, having choices is generally seen as good thing. Choices can lead to disagreements however when everyone in a group shall prefer something quite different. Groups often form around their shared interests, but over time, interests may and often do, change.

Our expectations, generally speaking, are connected to our background exposure and experience. We build new knowledge incorporating novel data with older known experiences. What we have been exposed to prior to our coming into the tabletop RPG hobby will impact our expectations of the experience and our preferences for certain types of experiences. 

The era of the 1970s included widespread popular reading of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth trilogy. It was a fair bet that most of the gamers at any given table playing The World's First Role-Playing Game were passingly familiar with Tolkien's fiction. At that time Harry Potter had not yet been written about by J.K. Rowling so gamers did not come to the table expecting to see a "magical school" full of broomstick riding children. Many introduced to the then new hobby in the 1970s had read Tolkien as well as many of the other authors listed in Gary Gygax's "Foreword" to The Original Role-Playing Game (and in his famous Appendix N once that became available for reference). There was at the time a certain common expectation based on shared familiarity with certain sources of fantastic fiction that formed the basis for general acceptance of certain tropes as found in those sources. Many (but not all) of those tropes and themes still appeal to me.

Exploration and survival were among the themes commonly found in those pre-1974 sources and therefore became shared expectations of the "White Box" game experience. There were many other commonalities between fiction, gaming and gamers as well as many diverse concepts scattered throughout the different source materials and I credit it a strength of the original game that its authors were able to connect with so much variety and produce a game acceptable to so many.

Today's game also draws upon certain shared sources of inspiration. Although the game's name is the same, much of the similarity ends there. The current edition has many recognizable features, but those are increasingly "in name only". A comparison of "old" and "new" will readily reveal many of these differences and I have written about a few on this blog. Although no one is dictating how we are to play the current game at our table, there is clear messaging regarding the "preferred style and manner" in which its publisher would like to see their product used.

The more I play and run 5e, the less satisfied I am with it. Reading anything beyond the starter books and free download "Basic" edition is off-putting as the current game makes many assumptions about play that I find un-appealing. It still says its the same game when I look at the title, but I am thinking this edition has come a long way from 1974. I suppose that is precisely the intended point!

Having only passing familiarity with the sources in popular culture from which the designers of the current material draw, and honestly, very little interest in the ones that I am familiar with, I am increasingly convinced that I am not their "target audience". And I am increasingly "okay" with that realization.

Now where did I put those Three Little Brown Books?